Familiar Stranger
by Agent Malkere
Summary: Watching paint dry would probably be more interesting. Danny Ocean really had no patience for long lines and waiting if it wasn't for a job. oneshot. Ocean's 11/Bourne Identity crossover.


_**Familiar Stranger** _

_Agent Malkere _

**Disclaimer: I don't own Ocean's 11 or The Bourne Identity. I've just got a laptop and a vivid imagination... **

_A/N: This takes place some time after the first movie. Also, I know I got some things wrong in the description for the BI, but, hey, I haven't seen the movie in over a year - I was bound to forget some of the details. Anyways, on with the story! Enjoy!_

Danny Ocean resisted the urge to shift from foot to foot impatiently. This was more boring than watching paint dry. Given, he had never _actually_ sat down and _watched_ paint dry, but he figured it was at least as bad as this. During a con, Danny had an infinite amount of patience and could calmly sit and watch paint dry until it pealed, safe in the knowledge that, even though nothing was happening _right now_, there was going to be action and excitement in the near future. This, however, was _not _a con or even _part_ of a con. _This_ was boring as hell. He'd tried entertaining himself by pretending to scope out the place for a heist, but that had only lasted for all of two minutes and then he was back to being bored out of his mind again. Why the hell would anybody want to pull a heist in an American embassy, anyway?

He stared up at the plaster molding of the ceiling and wondered absently how much time had passed. Danny kept his gaze fixed firmly on the ceiling. He was not going to check his watch, he was not going to check his watch he was no- Damn, had it really only been forty-five minutes since he'd gotten here? It felt like it had been more like three hours. And he wasn't even at the front of the line yet. A young woman with multicolored hair had been holding up Danny's line for about a quarter of an hour arguing with the person at the desk over visas or something. He'd listened for a little while, but the argument just kept going in circles, so he'd zoned out again.

This would have been so much easier if Tess had just let him use his various contacts to get a new passport instead of going the old fashioned way and actually getting one through the government, but he had been trying to stick closer to the straight and narrow of late. Danny had gotten the passport and made the mistake of not looking through it carefully enough. Stupid, _stupid_ amateur mistake. And now he was stuck here because, though customs officials had failed to notice it when he was leaving the US, the government had screwed up his passport and he couldn't get back into the country. (Once again, when he called Tess to tell her why he wasn't going to be home on time, she'd told him in no uncertain terms that, if he used his contacts and showed up on the doorstep without a passport that had been fixed the _legal_ way, he was going to be sleeping on the couch for the next three months. Tess could be so stubborn sometimes.) So here he was faulty passport in his jacket pocket, bored to death and almost to tears.

The atmosphere of the whole building was rather depressed and gloomy. Everyone seemed to be wearing dull colors or neutrals and even if they weren't, the general drabness of the place seemed to swallow them alive. Danny wondered if there was a high suicide rate among embassy employees. He wouldn't be surprised, just standing line there for three quarters of an hour made Danny feel about ready to go skydiving without a parachute. Tess had better really appreciate that he was doing this for her.

Just as he was about to check his watch for the tenth time in fifteen minutes, Danny caught a flash of bright red out of the corner of his eye. Interest momentarily peaked, he turned his head to locate to source of the color. A young man with short, dark hair and a rather moth eaten, mustard yellow, wool sweater was walking past him. His face was turned away from Danny as he looked at something to his right and a red bag (apparently the thing that had caught Danny's attention in the first place) was slung over his shoulder. The young man looked oddly familiar, but something about his body language was off. Danny frowned slightly, trying to figure out where he might have seen him before. Then the young man looked in his direction.

If Danny hadn't spent so many years fine tuning and perfecting his control over his facial movements, his eyebrows would have skyrocketed and his jaw would have hit the floor. As it was, his expression barely even flickered. What was _Linus_ doing here?! Last he'd heard, the kid was still back in Chicago, picking pockets and finishing off his college degree or something. Had somebody else decided to use Linus on a crew for a con? But surely he would have heard through the grapevine (aka Rusty) if one of the former members of his crew for the Benedict job was helping pull a heist in Switzerland.

Danny almost called out to him but quickly thought better of it. It would be unprofessional – for all he knew, Linus could be in the middle of a job. Though how or why the US embassy was involved, he really couldn't imagine.

The kid looked anxious. It wasn't obvious. Most people wouldn't have even realized that Linus was anything but completely at home and at ease with his surroundings, but Danny was an expert. He'd made an art of reading people. It was what his entire career was based on. Something was still unsettling him about the way the kid was moving, though. He'd never seen Linus walk with that strange, fluid grace, like an athlete. And the strangest part was that the movement was completely natural. The kid probably wasn't even aware he was doing it. Linus hadn't exactly been clumsy or anything before, but he'd certainly never moved like _that_.

The guards standing by the embassy doors, who'd been looking bored but attentive until now, straightened up as their shoulder radios began to crackle and then began to walk in Linus's direction.

"You with the red bag, halt!" The guards had un-holstered their side arms. Uh oh – that couldn't be good. The kid's pace quickened almost imperceptively for a moment, but then he stopped just beyond the 'L' corner that made up the rest of the room. He was still well within Danny's line vision. He raised his hands in the air as the guards approached him from behind. Danny made a mental note to call Rusty and let him know that the kid had gone and gotten himself pinched.

And then it happened. Just when the guards got within reach, the kid… lost it? Went psychotic? Knocked out four men at once single handedly? There were no words Danny could find to describe the flurry of flying limbs and fists that followed. This time Danny's eyes _did_ bulge and his jaw _did_ fall open. Less than a minute later, the person he had been _positive_ was Linus Caldwell was standing over the incapacitated guards, one of their guns in his hands and a startled look on his face. The young man stood frozen like that for a second as if unable to believe what he had just done and then dropped the gun as if it had burnt him. He took a step back and then turned and left at a quick walk but not a run.

Danny continued to gape at the spot where the kid, who wasn't the kid, had been standing a moment before. It felt like his brain was imploding. Holy. Shit.

--

_Brrrring! Brrrring! Brrrring! _

Linus rolled over in his bed with a loud groan. He opened one eye and squinted at the digital alarm clock on his bedside table. The glowing green numbers proclaimed it to be two thirty-five am. He reached out and slapped at the side table in a halfhearted attempt to locate his blaring cell phone. When he finally found the damn thing, he flipped it open and pressed it to his ear without bothering to check the caller ID.

"Hello?" Linus mumbled, closing his eyes and allowing his head to flop back down onto his pillow.

"_Linus?"_ The voice on the other end of the line sounded very familiar, but it took Linus's half awake brain a moment or two to figure out who it was.

"Danny? Is something wrong? Did something happen?" he asked, more awake now, opening his eyes and propping himself up on one elbow. Why the heck would Danny be calling him in the middle of the night?

"_No, no – where are you?"_ Danny's voice didn't sound as calm and collected as usual.

"Chicago." Why was he asking? Danny already _knew_ that. The guy practically knew _everything_.

"_Oh, good."_ There was an awkward pause.

"That it?" Linus asked at last, stifling a yawn with his free hand.

"_Yeah."_ Then Danny muttered something that sounded along the lines of 'Be seeing ya' and hung up. Linus sat and stared at the phone in his hand for a moment. He flipped it shut and tossed it back onto the bedside table. Linus let gravity pull him back down to the mattress and burrowed back into the blankets covering his bed. That had jut been weird. He needed to start turning his cell phone off at night. Maybe he should call Tess and let her know that her husband was losing his mind….


End file.
